The difference between a poet on the one hand and
a historian or a moral or physical philosopher on
the other is the same as the difference between a
clouded sky and a clear sky, since in each case the
same light exists in the object of vision, but is
perceived in different degrees according to the capacity
of the observers. Poetry, furthermore, is all the
sweeter since a truth that must be sought out with
some care gives all the more delight when it is discovered.

Francis
Petrarch, Coronation Oration

. . . The foundation and the initial speedup took
place in the fatherland. Our existence in Russia was
the cause. Today you have the eect.

Joseph
Brodsky, from Conversations with Joseph Brodsky
by Solomon Volkov

First,
let's get the obligatory introductory remarks out of the
way.

Michael Iofin is a painter and graphic artist, a mature
master with complete command of his craft. At one time
his painting gravitated towards the genre of trompe
l'oeil, in which an illusion of reality is created
on a plane in order to trick the eye. Though trompe
l'oeil demands authentic technical virtuosity, during
Iofin's youth the genre was not a rarity, given that it
served as a refuge. While the theoreticians of Socialist
Realism were still battling abstractionism, which by then
had faded, trompe l'oeil, in itself very realistic,
served as a phantom umbrella. Yet Socialist Realism was
never a concern for Iofin: his coming of age fell during
the rst exhibits of the unofficial, i.e. subversive art,
which immediately defined his artistic and at once personal
ideals. He wasn't engaged with the official aesthetics,
but rather was formed in the atmosphere of independent
Soviet (anti-Soviet? extra-Soviet?) avant-garde of the
1960-80s, becoming one of its devoted participants. Therefore,
the illusionism in some in his works is not a trick, but
rather a phase in his natural personal evolution.

Like a pianist who manages to strike a record number of
keys in a given unit of time, a master of tromp l'oeil
may choose to limit himself simply to demonstrations of
technical reworks, yet there is more to the genre: meaningful
things can be expressed there as well, as we will see.
In America, Iofin has gradually changed his style. His
paintings no longer pretend to be reality but speak of
their own presence (or about their own reality, if you
like) which they do by many means: an unnatural color
palette, a distinctive, signature, surface texture (thanks
to the special oil pastel technique invented by the artist),
marked silhouettes, deformations.

Has Iofin ceased to be a realist? He never was oneand
if he was, this lasted no longer than a short while.

What art critic doesn't strive to classify a painter?
Paste him, like a butter y on a pin, into an appropriate
display case? Let us try to discern the boundaries of
the class.

At one extreme I would put those several of Iofin's paintings
that depict other paintings. One dresses up as a Chagall,
another as a René Magritte, a third one as a Falk,
and so on. They are not copies: not one of these painters
had such paintings! Nor are they counterfeits: Iofin follows
the style and iconography with a certain degree of proximity
but not closely enough to cause confusion. Moreover, as
an alibi, Iofin painted not only the pictures, but also
the frames, thus putting quotation marks around the quotation.
Hence, nothing except for the frame is in the first person,
as if the personality of the author, whose own hands painted
the picture, were absent. Instead, there is a self-renouncing
medium through whom speak the spirits of the late masters.
If the author does not completely put aside his voice,
then he makes only a bow, a show of reverence, a gesture
of homage, nothing more.

These pastiches, paintings "in the style of" great
masters present only an extreme case of the saturation
of Iofin's art with the art of others. It is well-known
that art is nourished as much with life as with art itself;
in the end, as Paul Valerie would joke, a lion is made
of a well digested ram. The question of the relationship
between the lion and the ram, however, is not that simple:
at a later point in history came news of which Valerie
had not even dreamt. Contemporary times challenged the
very principle of personal authorship with all its consequencesup
to and including the issue of copyright. An unheard-of
communization of imagery occurred, and Iofin was a co-conspirator
in this revolutionary enterprise.

His paintings swarm with fragments of other famous pieces
of art. Often openly exposed, but at times veiled and
requiring identification, these references are intertwined
with creations of Iofin's own imagination. Like this:
at a table standing on the street sit the loafers from
Jan Steen's painting at the Hermitage; or on another street
only one of those two loafers remains; or Iofin, asleep
somewhere on a roof, is attacked by Salvador Dali's tiger;
Marc Chagall from his own painting stands in the midst
the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg with his hand raised,
the hand that the flying Bella was touching in the original;
or the portraits by Pierro della Francesca of Federigo
da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza are mounted
into the compartments of a fantastical display along a
fragment of a Dutch still life; or among the participants
in a San Francisco carnival one can spot the head of one
of Breugehl's blind men, the man in a red turban from
a van Eyck's portrait, Durer from the self-portrait of
1498, and again the tireless loafer of Jan Steen. Further
on, Vermeer from The Allegory of Painting stares
into the cloudy wall of Magritte; still further on, in
a densely populated Homanian painting, Signor Arnolfinifrom
a well-known double portrait by Jan van Eyckhas
turned his back to us, while his lovely wife remains in
her own pose, only now she is crying, and the pair of
wooden slippers, the symbol of domestic comfort and matrimony,
is standing just as they used to. . . Should I continue?

Well, this is the case not only with Iofin: the time has
come when in a culture saturated with art, the art took
on itself. Dressing up, pretending, exchanging masks,
endlessly quotingall these variants of an ironical
game with the classics by means of simultaneous unication
and estrangement comprise the vague, fuzzy concept of
postmodernism. At the dawn of the postmodern epoch (which
thus named itself even before its own coming) bilingualism
seemed almost its primary characteristic. Charles Jencks,
the prophet of postmodernism, referred to this feature
as "dual coding": one code for the masses, and another,
secret, for the initiated. For instance, where "a
man in the street" sees a fragment of a column aimlessly
inserted into the interior, a possessor of esoteric knowledge,
a player in the game, will recognize the quotation (a
Corinthian capital from the Temple of Apollo in Phygalia)
and this recognition in itself makes him a participant
in rened entertainment. The problem, in truth, is that
the mechanisms of mass culture re-mill the fragments of
high-brow art with ever-increasing speed: at a stationary
store one can buy a blow-up doll of the personage of Munch's
Scream, Vermeer's Allegory of Art fits an
advertisement just as well as do Magritte's paradoxes,
and your computer mouse can afford the luxury of gallivanting
on top of Van Gogh's self-portrait. The real postmodernism,
probably, starts where different cultural codes are split
apart and re-mixed into an unstructured plasma, where
the sublime and the profane perform in the same weight
divisions, where one's own and the someone else's collide
as equals. In literature, such collision is called intertextuality;
paintings can be considered intertextual as wellin
as much as they can serve as texts.

In any case, let's talk about High Art.

Any variant of postmodernist art excludes personal origin,
existential experience, internal necessitythis is
the art of inventiveness and wit. Here is not the place
to develop this thesis, I'll just try to explain myself
with the aid of an example. Komar and Melamid's worthy
project, Most Wanted Painting, a series of paintings
drawn in strict agreement with the results of a poll,
can serve as a model. The project is multi-purposeful:
a literal parody of the slogan "Art belongs to the people"
accomplished in an idiotically scrupulous, science-like
manner co-exists here with the ultimate resolution of
the personality question. The author, or more precisely
authorship as a principle is annihilated without a trace,
and in its place is mounted a awless proxy for the people's
visual imagination. Or lack thereof. We cannot engage
in a dialog with Komar and Melamid: they are not there.

But Iofin cannot escape from himself and, regardless of
whether or not we so desire, he does position us for dialog.
He is an incomplete, an improper, or, if you'd like, a
decient postmodernist, a postmodernist with a human face.

Herein lies the other boundary of the class being described.

Not withstanding stylistic and semantic diversity in Iofin's
painting, I find in it both explicit and concealed leitmotifs.
St. Petersburg is the most drawn-upon and drawn-out among
them. For Iofin St. Petersburg can be a subject unto itself,
but it can also be a singular city space able to contain
anything: scenes of street life from the tsarist times
as well as that of the most modern era, absurd companies
of "the artist's friends," a promenade with Chagall
(is it not along the street where the Artists' Union has
its offices in the building of the former School of the
Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts where
Chagall studied?), a fragment of an old Dutch still life
(or the Russian parody of it) inserted into the perspective
of a streetthe list can continue. We will return
to street life later, but now one more remark on combining
the uncombinable.

If one so desires, it is possible to see here another
referenceone both refined and concealedto
the classical tradition. The yoking of realistic motifs
and real subjects with symbolic objects and allegorical
gures has been well-known at least since the Renaissance;
during the Baroque era, no one took offense at such combinations.
In Rubens's paintings, Henry IV and Maria Medici find
themselves surrounded by Olympic gods representing qualities,
destinies, merits, and virtues. In the eighteenth century,
Pompeo Battoni composed a painting using "the Iofin
formula": a realistic city landscape, a line of Venetian
palaces facing the Grand Canal, is recessing and in the
foregroundas if invading from the fourth dimensionappears
an allegorical pyramid: on a chariot harnessed with lions
rides Venice herself (as a fair lady), surrounded by Minerva
(as Wisdom), Neptune (as the Master of the Sea), Cerera
(as Abundance), Mars (as Invincibility), and so on. Such
is, if you'd like, the antique intertextuality. For a
normal eye this mixing of the real with the symbolic,
of a fragment of reality with transformed mythological
quotations would seem absurd. Iofin develops the absurd
from this point to its logical end. Rather than a Venetian
perspective, the streets of St. Petersburg serve as a
real backdrop, and in place of commonly known allegories,
there are personal ones, without fixed meanings, blurred,
unclear, appealing not to thought, but to imagination.
What are those strange "friends of the artist" up to on
the embankment? If you'd like, you may see in each of
them depictions of loneliness, restlessness, aimlessness,
stubbornness, lostness, disconnectednessa kind of
one-time allegory, just for this case, ad hoc.
You may even go further, having assumed, and not without
basis, that the artist never had such friends, that all
these friends are he himself, that here we have a self-portrait
in characters, a personication of his own existential
situation. Hidden in his absurd is a proprietary logic:
you are given initial imagery to start with, and you are
then free to draw your own inferences.

However, there are also works where one can find permanent
symbols with fixed meanings. I suspect that such explicitness
appeared in those places where imagery intersected directly
with biography. The motif of a heavy, impermeable brick
wall is present in several paintings marking the end of
the Soviet era: The Beginning of the Journey, The
Beginning, The Hour of First Sun. It is not
surprising that in the first two there twinkle the glints
of Sotsart with its scoffing poetics. The latter, with
its simple symbolism of immured and open window openings
has the least narrative; the plasticity of a deaf wall,
all crooked but absurdly indestructible, is tense to a
nightmarish degree, and the glimpses of the shining skies
in the several unobstructed windows fail to bring a cathartic
resolution. Yes, you guessed it! The painting is dated
1990.

That those paintings and others like them are autobiographical
is obvious. The motifs of the sky, light, taking off,
sailing away are transparent symbols of emigration rendered
as internal experience, lived through not as reality,
of course,what reality?!but rather as a dream,
as an illusion, as a departure for Utopia. The personal
nature of the image is stripped to the nakedness of a
diary entry that is truly addressed to no one.

Here we approach the core. Michael Iofin is an émigré,
an artist formed in the Soviet state (which does not mean
that he is a "Soviet artist") who in mid-life relocated
to the banks of the San Francisco Bay, to a wonderful,
but very much other city, to a different socio-cultural
environment, to a country where the art world is organized
according to different rules. "There the beginning,
here the consequences." The fantastic edifice of Iofin's
painting is built on a fracture, hence its internal tension
and dramatism.

Most likely, only thus could appear the paradoxical St.
Petersburg of his dreams. Here one would like to insert
the adjective "nostalgic", but then the adjective
"paradoxical" would have to be removed, whereas the
situation is such that both must stay.

Let us look closer.

In St. Petersburg, or to be more precise in Leningrad,
Iofin created a series of paintings titled Letters
from St. Petersburg. Seven still lifes comprise the
series, each depicting with false realism a set of objects
spread out over old sheets with views of the city. The
title of the series is also a kind of trompe l'oeil
: those letters are from Leningrad, they are the
chronicle of the modern history of the city, reflected
in the objects. Among Iofin's work The Letters
is probably the most literary organized series of paintings:
it consists of five chapters with a prologue and an epilogue.
Time speaks through things. A Mauser pistol, an icon,
a severed telephone receiver, a postal stamp with a portrait
of Hitler, or a reel of magnetic tape will at some point
become objects of elaborate iconological deciphering,
maybe even very soon, but at present they are still easily
readable. Reproductions of these paintings have been published
as a separate album; a wonderful preface explains the
meaning of each object in relation to the time whose symbol
it had become. In comparison to other works by Iofin,
this series is perhaps all too understandable, as if to
reaffirm the old banality that still lifes are about people.
The series could seem illustrative if not for the intonation
which is inside (and yet bigger than) the narrative. The
articles collected in the painted space tell of a country
during one of the darker periods, if not the darkest one,
in its history. They glow with an equivocal light: a hard
evidence of poverty and tragedy of life is portrayed together
with the warmth of this life's uniqueness. Have you ever
gone through the belongings of someone recently deceased?
Entered a certain personal cosmos that once had a center,
a meaning, a function, which had suddenly lost the internal
connections and meaning, because an axis had just recently
been pulled out of its world? Now, this minute, still
preserved in its lingering alignment is the trace of the
life drama that happened here, but soon, this very second,
it will fall apart into insignificant entities each unto
itself. Not by accident the meaning-forming principle
used in this cycle echoed the one employed in the portrait
of the artist's parents.

Also in Leningrad, Iofin completed a series of seven lithographs
titled Bridges. There nothing is phantasmagoric.
Drawn in rather classical tradition, the views of the
city depict the lesser known bridgesnone of the
standard, postcard St. Petersburg among his art!small
bridges across canals whose names escape even the neighborhood's
inhabitants. The difference from the customary St. Petersburg
views is that the bridges are captured at tense angles
and the buildings, visible from below, rise above in reverse
perspective: the farther away they are, the farther their
walls come apart, leaning over the streets, their mass
increasing. Here one could hear the echo of the urban
insanity of deformed buildings and crooked streets from
the paintings of the expressionists, but weakened to such
an extent that the motif of insanity is no longer audible
and only the elevated plastic energy of the stone volumes,
surfaces, and lines remains. In this view the deformation
amplifes the unique spatial poetry of the city.

Here is the painting I have already named: The Hour
of the First Sun. It is an architectural thriller,
an image of a hopelessly enclosed space with immured window
openingsthe anti-windowsan image of prison,
whose ideal emptiness is scarier than many prison fantasies.
Its brick walls are clumsily yet solidly built in the
same diverging perspective, but the vital filling is removed.
The construction is bare. It is, therefore, easy to notice
that this is a possible inner side of one of the above-mentioned
St. Petersburg houses.

I think that this is a distilled expression of the duality
within the latest of Iofin's portrayals of St. Petersburg:
nostalgic attraction and idiosyncratic denouncement, all
together, inseparable and unfusable. Is not this why he
often populates the city with scenes from before the Revolution?
Those narrow-waisted maidens in long skirts, officers,
vendors, shops, petit-maîtres from the capital,
street sweepers with badges seem illustrations to unwritten
short stories from bygone times or naïve attempts
to erase the footprints of the past century from the face
of the city. On the other hand, when the depicted street
life relates to the places, times, and customs corresponding
to the artist's biographical experience, the romanticized
past and imaginary characters yield to the vulgar reality
of a beer kiosk.

The never-ending St. Petersburg cycle reveals its meanings
through juxtaposition and comparison of certain paintings.
Here, within the complete works by Iofin, appears the
second intertextuality, a personal one.

In several paintings, the same St. Petersburg street repeats
as if in a recurring dream: a tallish three-storey building,
then a two-storey, a little shorter, then a four-storey
one, a bit taller again, so that a piece of windowless
rewall is visible, then the street turns along the tram
tracks to the left, the perspective dead-ends into the
houses across the street, and occasionally the cupola
of St. Isaac's Cathedral reveals itself. This is the everyday
flesh of a city, the apartment buildingsyou are
free to recognize behind the identical windows diversely
populated rooms of communal flatsbut all identifiably
St. Petersburgian. All, only that in real St. Petersburg
the streets seem never to end, whereas here the space
is enclosed. So it is in many St. Petersburg compositions:
as if the hopeless looping of the perspective matches
the repetition of the motif. You die, then start all over
again. . .

Take a look at such paintings as Lonely Day or,
even better, Scream, a recent painting (dated year
2000), a translation of the universal Scream by
Munch into the language of Iofin-Petersburg urbanism.

It is possible to name other groups of paintings, where
multi-layer application of texts/images, like Petrarch's
clouds, envelop but also expose a certain personal truth.
The painting My House is dated 1994. A remote landscape
background speaks to us with a rare clarity: the left
half is the view of San Francisco, the right belongs to
St. Petersburg: there are now two homes. The foreground
is assembled from disjointed motifs, organized with little
care by an architectural enclosure that is falling apart,
unable to organize even itself. Flying gures of a lad
and a naked beauty head motionless towards a stone bed
placed high above, unstable and undefined (as everything
in this painting) since it rests on a broken arch less
one support. On the bed lies the painter himself (it is
his home, remember?), Salvador Dali's tiger jumping at
him is probably part of the painter's dream. Down on the
pavement Jan Steen's Loafers are having a party
with their drinking buddies; it is assumed that Steen
had painted himself, and therefore, besides Iofin's self-portrait,
present in the painting is yet another one. In front of
the table a disgusting boy with an elderly face stares
at us, the big army belt with a star on the buckle is
most noticeable in his attire. To the left on the same
pavement sits a foolhardy guitarist with a furry dog beside
him. Above the rustic socle of the house one can catch
a minute glimpse into its bowels: a faceless wall clock,
a shelf with books and dishes, a little boy is napping
by a window above, a bird having made a nest on the boy's
head sits there in great anxiety crying and beating its
wings. To the right, under the broken arch hangs a big,
old-fashioned lamp-shade, probably silken, festooned,
such as the ones that used to hang in the main room, or
the only room, in the middle, above the dinner table,
the center of family lifethe symbol and guarantor
of peace and cozinessbut here it exists in the ideal
blue emptiness, the microcosm that it used to organize
and keep together is lost andone must assumelost
forever.

I am not going to undertake the decoding of these symbols.
To force on each of them a particular meaning, even if
successfully, would be presumptuous. Together with its
uncertainty, The House would lose its charisma
of strangeness. Having retold the poetry with intelligible
prose, I would have taken away its music, untranslatable
into words, and its poetic openness to interpretations.

But here is what is interesting. My House is reminiscent
of another painting, completed earlier, most likely descending
from and undoubtedly evoking it. We can follow the very
path of the transformation. In that earlier one, called
The Inhabitants of an Inn, there are no distant
landscapes, we are presented with a frontal façade
of a building. At a table set for a street feast sits
the same Jan Steen from his own painting, beside him sits
Dürer from the earlier mentioned self-portrait, and
finally, Iofin himself. Here we have a conversation among
self-portraits: Having juxtaposed a jolly Dutchman with
a rigorous and elevated German, our author is chatting
with both of them.

On the left, in place of the guitarist, are two mimes,
Pierro and Colombina. In a window above is a nude beauty,
she hasn't yet flown off. The skull on the windowsill
recalls the repented sinner Mary Magdalene. The wall clock
in the center has grown to monstrous proportions, and
out of it, on a spring, bolts a mechanical bird, the predecessor
of the one who will make a nest on the head of the sleeping
boy. The bird is crying. The little boy sits by himself
on a step of a fragile re-escape ladder. On the highly
placed bed, exposed to the whole world, sleeps a faceless
angel with folded wings, and behind this angelic resting
place through a rectangular aperture opens a joyless perspective
on a city. One can arrange a visual experiment overlaying
these two paintings: house-inn, faceless angel-sleeping
artist, and so on. Similarities and differences of such
images give birth to yet new overtones in this complex
and difficult reflection on oneself, on one's place in
this world, on how it is both whole and split in two.

There is one more painting that one cannot avoid mentioning
in relation to this, especially as it is called My
House 2. It differs from its predecessors in its simplicity:
without paradoxes, frontally, filling practically all
the canvas, stands an ordinary St. Petersburg house. In
this house the artist probably actually dwelled. The vital
truth is apparent: the house is not quite in order, the
gutters are leaking, the gates are crooked. But with Iofin,
simplicity can only be imaginary. Look closely: the house
is dead, the lifeless windows either shine with black
abysses or reflect the gray light. In the same blind fashion
the depth of the backyard behind the gates is closed.
Nobody is shoveling the snow. A natural house and a phantom
house, attraction and repulsion of memories wrap up the
internally connected cycle Houses.

I cannot possibly cover all that Michael Iofin did and
does. He is a master of many talents, and I have barely
mentioned his engravings or his superb book illustrations
(notably to stories by Babel and to Jewish folk tales).
This, however, is a dierent genre that demands a dierent
approach. I wanted to get to the heart of his anxious,
dramatic artistry, select the proper keys to the special,
paradoxical world of his painting, position him in a contemporary
context. What has been said about his endless St. Petersburg
cycle is also partly true with regards to the nervous
and, as always, intricate language of his paintings inspired
by the atmosphere of San Francisco.

As I see it, the diagnosis was pronounced in the beginning:
Iofin is a modern artist who, unable to escape the postmodern
consciousness, with every act of his creative existence
refutes its rules by creating art encoded in the modern
fashion and yet deeply personal, approaching confession,
challenging us to a sincere conversation, intellectual
and full of vivid feelings at once.